Organisms ? But what are those anyway ?

This is a term we refer to when we don’t want to be more precise than “something alive”. It could be a virus, a moth, a fungus, a big animal.

It also could be something less known, such as a transposon. But I might have a skewed idea about that, as it is at the limit of our understanding and acceptation for what is alive.

What is today’s understanding ?

All organisms are capable of replicating themselves and thus to be sujected to the evolution pressure as described by Darwin, revised by the neo-darwinists, meaning it incorporates into the Darwinist theory of evolution all the evidence and data collected since Darwin.

Also, all organisms live in their evironnement ; a complex network with others organisms, not only competing but also cooperating in symbiosis and other relationships.

All those networks are now the study of ecology for the large scale and of network biology for the small scale.

This aims to explain complex situations such as diseases like those we commonly associate with stress where the relation between evironnement, genetics and psychology are believed to be root causes.

Darwin didn’t know DNA was the molecule that embodied the genome and all the other ‘mecanistics details’ of gene regulation, mutations and the omics involved.

But I digress, and this will be all about the term Organism.